The invention relates to a method of enhancing the information contents of an image of a moving object. The invention also relates to a system in which a method of this kind is carried out as well as to a computer program enabling a data processing unit to carry out such a method. This method is used notably in the field of medical imaging systems.
A method of this kind is applied wherever images of a moving object are to be formed, which images often contain unavoidable motion artifacts. As a result, the object is usually imaged in a blurred fashion so that it offers a viewer only inadequate information concerning the object. Motion artifacts often give rise to unusable images in particular in the case of slice images or volume images of a moving object.
The article by D. Mattes et al. “Nonrigid multimodality image registration”, Medical imaging 2001: Image Processing, Proceedings of SPE vol. 4322 (2001), discloses a method in which an image of a moving object, acquired and reconstructed by means of the PET method and containing motion artifacts, is superposed on a further image of the moving object, acquired and reconstructed by means of the CT method, so as to form a combination image. The combination image is formed by special registration of the two individual images while utilizing pregnant, bilateral similarity information contained in both images. Because of the physical circumstances, the PET image contains pronounced motion artifacts which are not taken into account in the disclosed method and give rise to problems during the registration.